In the United States alone, more than 1 billion tons of human manure and otherwise is produced. David Wernick, a UCLA graduate student, said that all of that waste is being wasted, and that’s why he and his colleagues are trying to use the manure to product new types of biofuels.
Wernick said they are not only working with agriculture waste like manure, but they are also working with plant matter, sewage and carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
The big deal with poop is protein. Manure contains protein, and researchers are turning that protein into fuel. They are doing this by genetically engineering bacteria to convert the protein.
As of now, the researchers’ work suggests this would be easy to do. According to Uproxx, the biofuel that Wernick and his colleagues are creating doesn’t look like it needs to be refined or need any replacement of infrastructure.
To date, there hasn’t really been anything to compete with liquid fossil fuels, and this includes biofuels like ethanol derived from corn. Also, existing infrastructure and ethanol are not compatible, and people would need to make modifications to their vehicles if they wanted to use ethanol or other similar biofuels.
Wernick said that his poop-based biofuels will require no modifications to vehicles, and people could just drop it right into their cars.
